Struggling Phillips tries to box clever

By Clive White

12:01AM GMT 07 Dec 2003

Kevin Phillips will, as usual, be glued to the television set this morning. No, not because his wife would not let him watch last night's Premiership programme and he has had to get up to watch the early morning re-run on ITV2. Something much sadder than that: he will be watching replays of matches, in all probability, a few years old. The Southampton striker, you see, has lost the knack of goalscoring and needs to watch videos of himself doing just that in the hope that he can get it back.

The man who Howard Wilkinson famously said last season had gone from "Golden Boot to rubber welly" has, sadly, still got the galoshes on. It is now eight games since he last scored which is probably as near to a crisis as this even-keeled individual has come since Southampton released him to non-League Baldock as a teenage full-back.

An inevitable consequence is that Southampton have been sterile, too, and they go into today's home match against Charlton without a goal in more than six hours of Premiership football, prompting Phillips to declare: "It's time for me to start taking a bit of pressure off James [Beattie] because he's the one who's been providing the goods - we rely on him too much. I know because I had it at Sunderland for many a year."

For most strikers such a barren run would have been reflected in their all-round play. But not Phillips. The rest of his game has held up remarkably well, so well that his manager Gordon Strachan told him the other day: "You must be the best out-of-form striker I've ever seen'."

The 30-year-old Phillips has been around long enough to know that's not much of a compensation, not when a club of Southampton's size have forked out £3.25m for a player to do what used to be second nature to him. "We're quite fortunate nowadays with technology," said Phillips. "I've got many videos that I can sit and watch and I do watch them regularly for about half an hour on a Saturday morning before games, just to remind myself what it was like to keep hitting the net regularly."

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There was, as he says, a time when Sunderland relied on him implicitly to score their goals. The year he won the Golden Boot, in 1999-00, his first season in the Premiership, his 30 goals accounted for 60 per cent of Sunderland's total. At the moment, his sidekick Beattie is doing even better with 70 per cent of Southampton's haul. "I'm sure when I signed, James would have looked and thought, 'Yeah, a bit of help', because I know how it felt when we were struggling," he said. "I would have loved someone with a good reputation to have signed for Sunderland."

And yet it all started so well, with a goal on the opening day of the season for both him and Beattie at the Walkers Stadium. "I think people started to get a bit carried away," said Phillips, "I don't think me and James were. Then I got the three-match suspension which knocked me and the partnership back a little bit and since then we probably haven't done as well as we know we can."

Replicating his little and large act with Niall Quinn was always going to be a tall order - and not just for reasons of physique - and he has wisely made a point of not comparing the two partnerships since arriving at St Mary's, but he did think that Beattie was "a better runner in the channels". "Let's face it," he said, "the early days at Sunderland were a bit route one. It was straight up to Niall - Niall won everything - and I ran on to it. Nowadays I don't think you can get away with that because defenders are too cute."

He had not spoken to Quinn since he left, but wondered whether it might not now be a good idea to do so. It would seem, though, that he is not entirely to blame for his modest haul of two goals in the league and one in the UEFA Cup. According to Strachan - who loves a stat - Southampton had created 50 per cent fewer chances than at the same stage last season, but their passing was better. "Can somebody work that out for me," asked a perplexed Strachan.

"There's no reason why Phillips shouldn't be scoring because he's as fit as he's ever been, he's as intelligent as he's ever been and his actual ability is as good as it's ever been. The way he's handled it has been absolutely fantastic. There's none of that feel-sorry-for-me type of stuff you get with some strikers. It's like, 'I'm a man, I know what's happening, I will sort it out myself'. I can talk to him as a manager, but I can't coach him because he knows more about strikers than me."

Meanwhile, the Saints manager has had to deal with the disappointment over his team's impotency in his own way, which after the defeat to Chelsea in their last home league match was to spend the evening listening to Tony Blackburn on the radio. "How sad is that!" said Strachan.